A Loose Consensus about Existence

The teacher is quiet. He is thinking, I cant believe I am doing this. He pulls on rubber gloves, reaches into a white plastic bag, and pulls out a human brain. A real human brain.

The students are quiet. They are thinking, I cant believe he is really doing this.

The students are thinking, if he hands it to me I will DIE, JUST DIE!

Sure enough, he hands it to them. They do not die.

When the brain comes back to him, the teacher tosses it across the table to the rubber-gloves quarterback of the football team, and he tosses it to his rubber-gloved tight end. Laughter as the tight end drops the brain on the table. The brain bounces.

To explain: In this beginning drawing class, I had been lecturing about the impact of brain research on the process of art, using pictures and diagrams and anatomy charts. We had tossed around a cantaloupe to get the feel of the size of a brain, but somehow brains remained a bit abstract. The students had that glazed expression on their faces that means this is getting b-o-r-i-n-g.

In that moment of educational ennui, a freshman girl says, I can bring a human brain to school if you wantmy father has lots of them. (Talk about a full-scale class alert: Shes going to do WHAT?)

Well, it turns out her daddy is a bona fide research neurosurgeon at the medical school and has jars and jars of brains in his lab and he would be pleased to have us see the real thing. So, sure, I can handle this. Bring a brain to school! I shout at the departing class. ALL of you.

Sure enough, a week later, the freshman girl, Queen Forever of Show-and-Tell, shows up with a brain in a bag.

Well, Mr. Fulghum, what do you think?

If ever there was an appropriate use of the word nonplussed, it is now. This is what the students call an oooo-wow moment of monumental proportion.

I have one of these things between my ears, I said. It is made up entirely of raw meat at the moment. It is fueled by yesterdays baloney sandwich, potato chips, and chocolate milk. And everything I am doing at the momenteverything I have ever done or will dopasses through this lump. I made it; I own it. And it is the most mysterious thing on earth.

(This brain in my hand wasnt raw, mind youit had been preserved in formaldehyde. And no, it was not in fact icky ore gross. Light beige in color, slightly damp, soft and rubbery, like clay. And just about the size of that cantaloupe we had passed aroundonly this one weighed almost three pounds.)

Now I can kind of understand the mechanical work of the brainstimulating breathing, moving blood, directing protein traffic. Its all chemistry and electricity. A motor. I know about motors.

But this three-pound raw-meat motor also contains all the limericks I know, a recipe for how to cook a turkey, the remembered smell of my junior-high locker room, all my sorrows, the ability to double-clutch a pickup truck, the face of my wife when she was young, formulas like E=MC2, and A2 + B2 = C2, the Prologue to Chaucers Canterbury Tales, the sound of the first cry of my firstborn son, the cure for hiccups, the words to the fight song of St. Olafs College, fifty years worth of dreams, how to tie my shoes, the taste of cod-liver oil, an image of Van Goghs Sunflowers, and a working understanding of the Dewey Decimal System. Its all there in the MEAT.

One cubic centimeter of brain contains ten billion bits of information and it processes five thousand bits a second. And somehow it evolved over a zillion years from a molten ball of rock, Earth, which will itself fall into the sun someday and be no more. Why? How?

Thats what I think.

Oooo-wow, chorus the students. The teacher is in a groovegot em.

Once again the brain is passed around from hand to hand, slowly and solemnly. Once again, it is very quiet. The Mystery of Mysteries is present, and it includes us.

The single most powerful statement to come out of brain research in the last twenty-five years is this:

We are as different from one another on the inside of our heads as we appear to be different from one another on the outside of our heads.

Look around and see the infinite variety of human heads-skin, hair, age, ethnic characteristics, size, color and shape. And know that on the inside such differences are even greaterwhat we know, how we learn, how we process information, what we remember and forget, our strategies for functioning and coping. Add to that the understanding that the world out there is as much a PROJECTION from inside our heads as it is a PERCEPTION, and pretty soon you are up against the realization that it is a miracle that we communicate at all. It is almost unbelievable that we are dealing with the same reality. We operate on a kind of loose consensus about existence, at best.

From a practical point of view, day by day, this kind of information makes me a little more patient with the people I live with. I am less inclined to protest, Why dont you see it the way I do? and more inclined to say, You see it THAT way? Holy cow! How amazing!

This set me to thinking about Einsteins brain, which is somewhere in Missouri in a lab in a jar now. It was removed and studied to see if it was special in some way. (No, it wasnt. It wasnt his equipment, but what he did with it, that cracked the window on the Mystery of Mysteries.) When Big Al was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, a guest asked to be shown Einsteins laboratory. The great man smiled, held up his fountain pen, and pointed to his head. (Oooo-wow.)

Answers

"The single most powerful statement to come out of brain research in
the last twenty-five years is this:

We are as different from one another on the inside of our heads as we
appear to be different from one another on the outside of our heads.

Look around and see the infinite variety of human heads-skin, hair,
age, ethnic characteristics, size, color and shape. And know that on
the inside such differences are even greaterwhat we know, how we
learn, how we process information, what we remember and forget, our
strategies for functioning and coping. Add to that the understanding
that the world out there is as much a PROJECTION from inside our
heads as it is a PERCEPTION, and pretty soon you are up against the
realization that it is a miracle that we communicate at all. It is
almost unbelievable that we are dealing with the same reality. We
operate on a kind of loose consensus about existence, at best."

Thank you. I think I have more in common with Robert Fulghum than I
do with my oldest brother OR the fireant in my backyard.

This reminds me of an episode of "Outer Limits" that I watched last
night. Judging by the dark purple volkswagon, this was circa 1999 or
2000.

The show began with a teen who had more in common with his
grandfather than his father. The grandfather was Joe [an icon in the
department of creating and playing songs for the guitar.] The father
resented HIS father [although allowing him to live in his
house], and thought guitar-playing was a useless hobby. It simply
wasn't PRODUCTIVE. I forgot his name, but let's call him Tom.
The son's name was Ricky.

Tom grew to resent Joe's influence on Ricky. He wanted the
BEST for his child, and felt Joe was leading him astray. He
decided to put Joe into a home for old folks.

As the show progressed, it was shown that this home for old folks was
harvesting the memories of the folks there. Joe had been
quite the lady's man, so his sexual expertise was harvested
via probes into the portion of his brain controlling that memory,
then downloaded. All the old folks who came to this home had their
memories downloaded until they ended up with no memories at all. [It
was more of a brain suck than the download of a copy.]

Ricky met a young woman who had come to the home to visit her
grandmother. She told him that something strange was happening
there, and Ricky could notice the measurable downslide on the part of
his grandfather.

SUDDENLY Tom bought a computer [even though he'd never known
anything about them.] He claimed he had gained some skills at the
office, but Ricky was hesitant to believe this. The next thing Ricky
knew, Tom had quit his job and had started a computer business out of
his home. Tom's personality was ALSO changing. Where he'd once had
ideas of how one SHOULD live one's life, he seemed more in tune with
Joe's attitude of "Do what you enjoy doing and you'll never have to
work another day in your life."

One day Ricky followed Tom to the old folks' home. He saw Tom hooked
up to a computer. Later that day, Ricky called Tom on this, asking
WHAT he was doing at the home and WHAT he had done to his
grandfather. Tom told him that his grandfather was OLD, and old
people typically let their skills and memories die with them. He
confessed that he'd gained his computer skills from the memories of
an oldster at the home, going on to explain that this, combined with
having obtained some of Joe's memories, would make him the father
Ricky always wanted.

Ricky HATED Tom for USING Joe in this way. He was determined
to get Joe out of the home. He borrowed a gun and made his
entrance. He coerced the folks at the home to remove Joe from his
place sleeping on a slab in a hall full of drawers, and put him in a
wheelchair where he would deliver Joe to the waiting car of the girl
with the purple volkswagon. On the way out, he met up with his
father and the director of the home. Ricky wanted DESPERATELY to
shoot the director for what he'd done to his grandfather, but he
didn't have it in him. The director wanted to deal with Ricky, but
Tom suggested he could handle it, and the director went back to his
office to wait for Tom.

Tom ended up taking the gun away from Ricky and telling him to take
Joe to his friend's car and then take him home. Tom then went into
the director's office [gun in hand], and led him to the machinery
that had sucked Joe's memories. The director was frightened, telling
Tom that the machinery was sophisticated, and he wasn't qualified to
use it. Tom knew all about the equipment at this point, however, and
sucked out the director's memories of this event.

In the end, Joe was home again with Tom and Ricky. Ricky was
patiently reteaching Joe how to play the guitar. Tom stood in the
doorway with tears in his eyes, as he'd received enough of Joe's
memories to know that doing what you love doing is the most important
thing in life.

"The single most powerful statement to come out of brain research in
the last twenty-five years is this:

We are as different from one another on the inside of our heads as we
appear to be different from one another on the outside of our heads.

Look around and see the infinite variety of human heads-skin, hair,
age, ethnic characteristics, size, color and shape. And know that on
the inside such differences are even greaterwhat we know, how we
learn, how we process information, what we remember and forget, our
strategies for functioning and coping. Add to that the understanding
that the world out there is as much a PROJECTION from inside our
heads as it is a PERCEPTION, and pretty soon you are up against the
realization that it is a miracle that we communicate at all. It is
almost unbelievable that we are dealing with the same reality. We
operate on a kind of loose consensus about existence, at best."

I agree with this quote, as far as it goes. There is a view that says
that we are 99.5% (or whatever) the same DNA as everyone else. Voila,
we are all the same! Egalitarianism uber alles.

Sure, we all have nearly the same organs and interconnection between
those organs. But it is the DIFFERENCES between us that make us
separate individuals. If those differences are due to .5% of our DNA
that is fine with me. I don't know what DNA is anyway. Who here does?
Z, anyone?

But what really intrigues me and what is never explained by SCIENCE is
what animates all these dead molecules to come together as a
self-organized clump of LIFE. What is the animating spark here?

I struggled thru Stephen Hawkings book "A Brief History of Time". All
about the cosmology of the universe, black holes, entropy,
singulariities, etc. Never once, in my memory, did he even mention
LIFE.

Maybe someday Science will explain how pieces of inert stuff can
transform to complex living organisms. Maybe it will even be able to
replicate this in the lab. Something tells me that it will never
happen. Something tells me that we must always be humble enough to
acknowledge that we exist in a mystery and that resorting to the idea
of an unexplainable, unknowable God-the-Creator is imperative.

No fair. It was my question first. All I know, and its not much, is
that there is spontaneity in the universe. There is spontaneity in
each our lives. Every word that we utter, no matter how banal, arises
from within; from out of nowhere. Synthesis, not analysis. Induction,
not deduction. Creation.

"Something tells me that we must always be humble enough to
acknowledge that we exist in a mystery and that resorting to the idea
of an unexplainable, unknowable God-the-Creator is imperative."

I suspect that our differences are less a function of any one creator
being at the root than the experiences we've had and our reactions to
those experiences. I'll take this further, as Bingo tried to do in
another thread and suggest that experiences in previous lives could
very well be at play here as well. I would agree that the mystery of
different personalities cannot be replicated in a laboratory,
independent of source.

Rupert Sheldrake proposes that there is a kind of memory in the
organizing fields of nature which determines the form of everything--
from the structure of crystals to the form of embryos slowly
developing into a human being. He suggests that there is a resonance
whereby forms are influenced by the memory of similar forms which
have occurred in the past. The collective memory of a species
determines what becomes the habitual shape of that particular
species. The organism is not only influenced by the collective
memory of the species, the biological memory of how to build the
phenotype, but it is also influenced by its former states of being.

The caterpillar is influenced by the larval memory just as the
butterfly is influenced by the trace of being a caterpillar. These
memories are held to be within "form fields" having particular
morphic (form) resonances in this hypothesis of formative causation.
The function of the brain is seen not as a recording mechanism with
physical memory traces, as in a computer, but as a tuning system
which can tune into both past and present patterns of activity. Thus
it can be seen that a brain and a computer are on totally different
evolutionary paths of intelligence. In the case of brain damage due
to surgery or accident the memory loss does not mean that specific
locations are lost, but rather that the tuning system of the brain no
longer functions properly.

If memories are not stored in the brain itself maybe we can pick up
another's memories if we hit the right frequency. Tuning into the
memory fields of past individuals begins to look remarkably like
tuning into Jung's "archetypes" in the collective unconscious. Such
theory might go a long way towards explaining such puzzling phenomena
as telepathy, past life memories, psychometry and other paranormal
behavior. If memory fields exist outside the apparatus of the
physical brain, then presumably they would survive damage or the
death of that brain. Of course there would be no access to them once
the tuning system had gone. However, if consciousness is not
identical to the functioning of that tuning system, but somehow is an
event which happens in the exchange between the morphic fields and
the brain, then it is possible that the "self" might stay in contact
with the eternal form field with its set of memories.